Getting Started with Portfolio Management › Get Started with Portfolio Management

Get Started with Portfolio Management

Using portfolio management, you can create and review a collection of investments that interest stakeholders in your business. Once you create a portfolio, the system creates a snapshot of your investment data that is used for management and reporting purposes. You can set up a cadence for updating the data in this snapshot to match your latest investment information. Thereafter, you can create alternate versions or plans using the data. To explore alternatives for your investments, use these plans to create and compare what-if scenarios.

A portfolio is a collection of investments. Depending on your needs, you can create the following types of portfolios that are based on the following:

• Investments (for example, PMO projects, IT applications, new product development product lines).
• Specific investments (for example, all active projects).
• Organization (for example, IT plan of record, marketing initiatives, company ideas).
• Interest (for example, green initiatives, merger and acquisition proposals).

Example: IT Portfolio for Current Projects

Max, the PMO Director at Forward, Inc,. wants to create a portfolio of all the projects that the organization currently supports. A target amount of budget and resources exist that Max can use for the projects. With all of the projects in the portfolio, Max uses Portfolio Management to accomplish the following business goals:

• Understand how the costs and resource demand for each project compares to the overall targets.
• Prioritize the projects so that the most important tasks get done first.
• Stage the planning so that resources and costs are kept level throughout the planning periods.

The following diagram describes how a system administrator and a portfolio manager get started with portfolio management.

To get started with portfolio management, perform these steps:

1. Evaluate Your Portfolio Requirements:
   • Monitor the Investments.
   • Prioritize the Investments.
   • Plan and Manage Investments Using Targets.
   • Explore the Alternatives for Investments.
2. Prepare to Use Portfolios:
   • Set up Monitoring Criteria for Investments.
   • Configure Views, Reports, and Workflows.
   • Set up Investment and Resource Data.